One Week In

It is Saturday afternoon and both of us are pretty well exhausted. We have just finished our first week of teaching at Zirve. We are both teaching 24 hours a week. We are both teaching listening, speaking, and reading. The prep school is divided up into about 35 different classes of 16-18 students. The teachers then cycle through those classes teaching the different skills. We meet with our reading students 7 times a week, listening 3 times, and speaking twice. Altogether we end up having about 120-140 students this term (we will have an 8 week term and then it will start over). It has been a lot of fun getting to know our students and interact with them in (and out of the classroom). It has not been so much fun trying to learn all of their names! It was a lot of new people to meet in a short amount of time.

I won't repeat everything that has happened this past week because there has been too much, but I want to give at least some of the highlights. There are a lot of great things about the university where we are working. It really has been a lot of fun. It is a new school and so there are lots and lots of things happening. They are growing at a pretty incredible pace. There are, however, some definite issues still to work out. As of the previousThursday night (before we started teaching on Monday) we had no idea what the syllabus were for the classes we were teaching, what materials we were using, how many classes we were teaching, how many times they met, when they met, where they met...pretty much we knew "classes are starting on Monday!" On Friday morning we had a meeting that gave us a little more information...and a stack of like two hundred pages of materials that some of the coordinators had been working on. It was really helpful...but took most of the weekend to figure out what was what. But we still did not know our teaching schedule (or things like how many times each class met during the week). They told us they would have them ready by the end of the day. So 5:00 comes and they are frantically printing and handing out the schedules. So we more or less knew what the plan was supposed to be for the week. We weren't ready for it...but we at least knew what it was. Then Saturday morning we got an email saying they had to change the schedule and that we could find out on Monday (or it might be posted on-line Sunday afternoon). So then we again had no idea what was up. From our perspective not knowing any answers it was a little overwhelming...for those who were working on the problems trying to find answers it was a ton of work. But in the end everything got sorted out and we all started teaching on Monday morning...only a few hitches...well there were hitches but classes went on all the same. (If you would like more about the saga of teaching at Zirve our other native English-speaking colleagues would be more than happy to tell you every horror of the experience)

Our classes have been so much fun to work with. Kylie has done an awesome job of putting together lessons plans and helping me to figure out what on earth I should be doing. We both have gotten along really well with our reading classes (which is good because we are with them seven hours a week). We are doing our best to cover the tons of material these students need to learn and also keep the classes fun. The way the program is structured the students we have are in the English prep school. They have to pass through the 4 levels of the prep school before they can enter their faculty classes in the university. There are 4 terms in the year. So theoretically a student could start off at the bottom level (A, which is where we teach) and by the end of the year pass all the way through level D and then be ready to enter university next year. It is a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time but we are hoping that a lot of students will be able to do it.

 So - school is a lot of work but really, really fun.

On other notes we are still working on Turkish and learning something new about every day. We learn some from our students (although we try to use only English with them). We learn a lot from the Turkish English teachers we work with. We've been able to develop some good friendships with them and that leads to teaching us lots of Turkish. We have also had some really good conversations and our getting to learn more about the culture and mindset of the people and share with them some of our own. So that is always an exciting thing to see.


A few pics: 1, 2: us on our first day of classes (kinda felt like kindergarten...((okay...felt like that for Kylie...for me it felt like my freshman year of college...aka=homeschool!)))
3: It is starting to get cooler and wetter here so Kylie got a jacket and rain boots. They are super, super cool...and even though she's not a purple girl it definitely is cute!
4: During the last week we've had two glasses break or chip so we had to get some new ones. These ones are nearly identical to our favorite ones we left at home...and they just happened to be the cheapest ones too (6 glasses for 4.00tl = $2.85)